Chrystia Freeland, the newly elected MP for Toronto Centre, says she has acquired a whole new respect for politicians since leaving her journalism career a few months ago

Chrystia Freeland first met Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau a year ago in Toronto, where the two started an ongoing conversation about how she might come home to Canada to run for the Liberals in the 2015 election.

“My respect for politicians has increased,” Freeland told the Star in a recent interview. “It’s hard work — even hard physical work. It’s also very exposed, in a way I think you know intellectually as a journalist, but the experience has given me a lot more sympathy for politicians.”

Freeland, 43, is accustomed to a frenetic work and travel schedule.

Born in Peace River, Alta., where her father still runs a 2,300-hectare farm, Freeland’s education, then her career, took her far afield — to Harvard University, to Oxford, to Ukraine and to New York, where she was living when she decided to take the political plunge in Canada.

She’s been a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Kiev, and a senior editor at the Financial Times, The Globe and Mail and at Reuters.

She and her husband, 43-year-old Graham Bowley — an author and journalist who works at the New York Times — have three children, aged 12, 8 and 4, whom Freeland speaks to in Ukrainian at home.

Freeland first met Liberal leader Justin Trudeau a year ago, when she was launching her newest book, Plutocrats, in Toronto. The two started an ongoing conversation about how she might come home to Canada to run for the Liberals in the 2015 election.

“I had this sort of long-term desire to come home, and then with my book, Justin’s team reached out to me,” Freeland said in an interview with the Star last summer. “Everything that they had to say about a middle-class agenda, putting that at the centre of what they want to do — and also the positive vision of politics — that really resonated with me.”

By coincidence, Freeland was in Ottawa the day that Bob Rae, the former premier and interim Liberal leader, announced in June that he was stepping down. A little more than a month later, Freeland was announcing a little sooner than she planned her intentions to run for the candidacy in Toronto Centre.

Almost immediately, she faced accusations — within and outside the Liberal party — that she was a parachute candidate, another Michael Ignatieff-type intellectual, coming home to Canada to pursue political ambition without a proper domestic grounding.

She was also attacked during the campaign for an article she wrote in 2008 in praise of former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin — “a feminist role model” — and for her participation in mass layoffs as a media manager.

Freeland has said the negative attacks on her were her biggest surprise about making the leap to politics, but she says she’s enjoyed the plunge nonetheless.

“I have always liked hanging out with people and talking to people,” she says, calling political life “hanging out with people — the fire-hose version.” Canvassing, she said, reminds her of her early assignments in journalism, approaching strangers to get the “vox pop” view of news events.

She’s also had to make the adjustment to working constantly with a team. “It’s like diving into a mosh pit and there are hands to catch you,” she says.

The former Liberal MP for this riding, Bill Graham, managed the campaign for Freeland’s nomination, and says he’s been pleasantly surprised to discover Freeland’s talents as a politician. She has been a fast learner, Graham says, in the art of making connections with people of all kinds — from Rosedale coffee parties to people in the apartment complexes of St. Jamestown.

Freeland said if she did win on Monday night, she would be doing her best to apply the lessons she had learned during these past weeks and months of frenetic campaigning — getting to work on the three big issues she kept hearing about from Toronto Centre residents: housing, transit and immigration matters.

“I think it’s possible to do some work on those issues, even in opposition,” she said, acknowledging that being a backbench MP for the opposition can be a “somewhat limited” position in terms of getting things done for constituents.

“But you can be a point of contact and information and advocacy for people.”

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